The Washington Post has been around for more than 150 years and is the largest newspaper in the nation's capital. So there's absolutely no excuse why the paper recently commissioned and published a poll related to the looming sequester which failed to account for the Democrats controlling the upper chamber, even though Republicans were noted as controlling the House.

It might be a secret to the Washington Post that Democrats control one chamber of Congress, but if they dug around a little bit, they might discover that Harry Reid runs the Senate. Of course, that hasn’t meant much in the last four years of budgeting, as Reid and his caucus have ignored the law that requires the Senate to actually produce a budget, but still, they’re at least nominally an independent player in this battle.

By the way, if the Senate had followed the law and produced normal-order budgets, we wouldn’t have the sequestration at all. The budget resolutions of both chambers would have gone to conference committee, which would have hashed out the differences. Obama would have signed the budgets, and we would have avoided nearly four years of crisis funding for the federal government. Reid and Obama haven’t used normal order because they want to keep using continuing resolutions as a means to keep the inflated FY2010 spending levels as the baseline going forward, and especially because they want to keep House Republicans from having a real voice on spending and budgeting.

Contrary to what some in the media are saying, sequestration was a Democratic initiative. It was the brainchild of Jack Lew and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Rob Nabors, who went to Senate Leader Harry Reid, and said this was a “solution” to the debt ceiling crisis in 2011. What's more, in November 2011, President Obama insisted he’d veto any bills that would get rid of the automatic spending cuts highlighted in sequestration plan. That was a great talking point headed into an election season where voters would be chiefly concerned with the economy and runaway deficit spending, but now that the election's won, the president's tune has changed.

Rather than barking and baying at the utter hypocrisy of the president and his congressional allies, the Washington Post is doing a great job being a cuddly lapdog.